Monthly Archives: August 2012

I recently passed by 3 people holding signs about the Occupy Wall Street protests.

They held signs informing all to see that “we are the 99%”

My wife reminded me that we are part of the 1%. She is right. We are. But probably not the 1% you are thinking of.

We are farmers.

We work in a business that is so demanding physically, and so poorly paid, that a major proportion of our co-workers are in this country illegally, in large part because only the most dedicated legal residents will do the work we do, under our working conditions, for the pay it provides, and they are not enough to get all the work done.

We do work that is so dangerous that we are exempted from the protections of the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA), created to protect workers from hazardous working conditions and dangerous materials.

In most states we are exempted from minimum wage laws. In most states we are effectively prohibited from forming unions, and in many cases have no real guarantees we will even be paid for our work, nor any recourse when we are cheated.

We work in a business that traditionally buys everything at retail and sells everything at wholesale. We are generally unable to set our own sales prices, and generally cannot negotiate purchase prices. To a large extent, prices are set by corporate conglomerates and investment speculators.

And yet we are absolutely essential to the welfare of everyone in the country.

It is possible to live without an iPhone, a cell phone or athletic shoes, it is even possible to live without a second dress or pair of pants, but it is not possible to live without food.

Yet the economics of growing food are so bad that in my lifetime, in the United States, we have gone from over half the population growing food to less than 1% doing so.

We–my wife and I and people like us–are the 1%. Like the majority of farmers in this country, we are 65 years old or older, and we are dying off.

And with the pay so low, and the cost of land so high, the next generations of farmers are blocked from taking our places because they cannot afford access to land.

Who will feed the people when we are gone, and where will they grow the food?

I’ve been working on that question for over 20 years, and I don’t know the answer. The corporate conglomerates and investment speculators don’t know (and apparently don’t care.)

My guess is, you probably don’t know either, but, as you probably plan to continue eating, you may want to pay more attention to the problem.